Good morning and happy Valentine’s Day from the snowy Continental Divide. I woke up around 4am and heard wolves howling at the moon, and captured this enormous lenticular cloud over the lodge at sunset yesterday.

Actively In Progress

The Future and Its Enemies: the Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia Postrel

• Fuel for envisioning how I can build companies with an orientation toward dynamism, rather than central planning

• Powerful reminder that the belief that we can predict and control the future gets humans into all sorts of trouble

• Possibly explanation for why my politics don’t seem to fit into the left or the right, but often are mistaken for being “conservative” by people my own age and “liberal” by people closer to my parent’s age

• After reading Future Shock I see it everywhere!

Winnicott on the Child by D.W. Winnicott

• Winnicott was a pediatrician who was among the first to also train as a psychoanalyst, and his writing influences to many parenting specialists

• He is widely know for the concept of “the good enough parent” to combat the emerging anxious parenting styles of mid-century women

• Kevin and I like to joke that part of our job as parents will be to play the role of Chief Disappointment Officer. After all, someone has to do the dirty work of slowly introducing children to the reality that they’re not the center of the universe

• This book is a compilation of post-humously published transcripts of popular radio talks and other presentations he gave in the 1960s that were not previously published

Right Weight, Right Mind: The Immunity to Change (ITC) Approach to Permanent Weight Loss by Dr. Robert Kegan, Dr. Lisa Lahey, Dr. Deborah Helsing

• This book is about a lot more than losing weight, and I’ve been working through it faithfully in my morning pages since the start of the year to support me becoming as healthy as I can before getting pregnant

• I am considering getting formal training in this methodology to support my coaching clients, as about 50% of them mention weight loss as a goal

• If you decide to read this, I recommend the Kindle book rather than Audible so you can copy/paste the questions and workbook items easily into wherever you take your reading notes.

Want more? Visit my Goodreads profile to see all 367 books I’ve marked “In Progress”

New Recommendations

Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life by Jenna LeJeune and Jason B. Luoma (2019) — thank you Andy Sparks for the rec!

What else? Visit my Goodreads profile to see all 2,731 books I’ve marked “Want to Read”

Recently Finished & Five Star Rated

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

• Lord of the Flies meets The Handmaid’s Tale with a dash of The Power

• Strong female protagonist

• Sex, violence, love, friendship, and radical self-reliance

• Excellent Audible narration

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Lanugage of the the Human Experience by Brené Brown

• Beautiful hard bound book of nearly coffee table size

• Describes 87 emotions, to increase your emotional granularity

• Make sure to jump to the end, where Brené lays out a new theory of emotional connection and meaning-making

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

• If you’ve ever felt stuck in a rut in life, this book will resonate

• Inspiring female protagonist and also a female “Gandalf” character (!)

• Grief, depression, searching, redemption, and self-acceptance

• I also loved his previous book How to Stop Time

How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson

• Being lazy is surprisingly punk rock

• Written by the publisher of the delightful periodical The Idler

• I also loved Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and this is in the same vein but set in Britain instead of Oakland

To see all my reading progress, including books I finished that didn’t get a 5 star review, visit my Goodreads profile and let’s be friends there.

Happy reading!

“What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow.”

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami